CDP Institute

While U.S. anti-trust regulators keep losing ground, European regulators are growing more feisty.  The latest blow came from Spain, where the competition watchdog CNMC has fined Apple and Amazon a combined $218 million for limiting Apple resellers on Amazon Spain.  While the stated purpose was to reduce sale of counterfeit goods, the CNMC found the result was to restrict competition among authorized sellers and from competing non-Apple products.

This Digiday/Wiland survey is mostly about using external data to enhance customer files.  It turns out that 57% of companies do it, two-thirds use four or more sources, and 17% use ten or more sources.  But the news I found most interesting is that 30% of brands have built their own ID resolution system and another 22% plan to build one.  Apparently it’s okay to try this at home.

PLG fans rejoice: while product-led growth has received less attention recently than it had been, this Openview report offers lots of interesting data on the topic.  Most eye-opening was that PLG is actually a minor source of new customers: the report puts it at 5%, compared with 32% from organic search, another 32% from sales, and 17% from paid marketing.

Attention-based ad measurement is generating a lot of interest these days, largely because traditional viewing measures are increasingly unreliable. Playground xyx uses eye-tracking panel data to measure attention to digital ads. They’ve just teamed with PubMatic to sell audiences optimized for attention.

Sometimes, having people pay too much attention to your ads can be a bad thing. This MAGNA study found that showing the same ad six times in one hour on a streaming network might increase awareness, but it also reduces purchase intent and positive brand perceptions. Consumers assume the advertisers are repeating the ads on purpose.

Identifying anonymous website visitors is also more important in a cookieless word. CDP vendor Cordial has launched a solution that identifies web visitors by matching their devices to a known profile in the Cordial ID graph. Cordial says data in its graph is collected with explicit user consent.

Full Circle Insights helps B2B marketers and sales teams measure their results.  They were just bought by Scaleworks, which buys and runs low-to-mid market B2B SaaS products.  It’s one of relatively few recent private investor acquisitions in martech, suggesting that even bargain hunters are feeling cautious these days.

Roku has been on a tear recently, signing deals to expand its advertising reach in every direction.  Last week it announced an agreement to let Roku ad viewers purchase from Shopify merchants through their TV.   It also announced a separate deal with Comcast-owned FreeWheel to expand access to ad inventory, enable targeted based on Roku data, and reduce ad fraud.

Publishers are increasingly unwilling to let everyone use their content for free.  While most recent discussion has been on payment for news links by Google and Meta, there’s also growing interest in ensuring that AI systems compensate owners whose content is used as training inputs.  OpenAI has gotten a bit ahead of the game in a deal with Associated Press, gaining a license to use its stories in return for undisclosed fees and technology access.  

Worries about training data haunt generative AI like a vengeful ghost.  Google has satisfied European regulators about its Bard data, to the extent that it has now released Bard in the EU.  But ChatGPT owner OpenAI faces multiple data-related lawsuits  and a Federal Trade Commission investigation.

Problems are also opportunities. Anthropic, which has raised a cool $1.5 billion, just launched its latest large language model, Claude2, promising it will explain its results and avoid harmful outputs.  Meanwhile, website search platform Lucidworks announced it will validate results from major generative AI platforms before delivering them to users.  Expect more vendors to let companies use their own data to train large language models.

Escaping LLMs for a moment, HCLSoftware has released a new Marketing Cloud.  The core of the system is HCL Unica, a marketing platform whose origins date back centuries (okay, just one century).  You won’t be surprised that the current version offers all sorts of AI-based automations.